Dr Martin Shaw on The Trickster

Dr Martin Shaw takes on the trickster

In a night of story, commentary, and sheer speculation, Dr Martin Shaw leads us into a fast and dangerous current of trickster stories. Wolverine blazes with hunger, Hermes thieves his brother’s cattle, Coyote trades a lonely hunter, a song makes old men turn to God, and a hare-hag flees a silver bullet… trickster has many guises.

He claims we’re living not in a Goddess time, or a Zeus era, but in a trickster moment. If that’s the case, then where do we find the company of a contemporary trickster? In the crook, the con-man, or still (just about) in service to the sacred? The Greek word Metis, meaning a skill or cunning, is what Shaw suggests we’d be wise to study. Crazy wisdom or smoke and mirrors? Come and make your own mind up. And be warned – these are not stories for the faint hearted.

‘lay a trap for a trickster, but beware of an honest man’ Arabian proverb

After the story and talk, it’ll be your chance to talk, question, muse and mull over what you’ve heard, what you think, what you agree with and what you don’t – whilst drinking wine and nibbling nibbles.

TIMETABLE
7.00pm Talk begins
8.15pm Audience Wine & Conversation (timing may vary)
9.15pm Event finishes (timing may vary, depending on how much discussion goes on)

MARTIN SHAW is a man who sometimes keeps a bear under his chair. An award winning author, storyteller and director of the West Country School of Myth in Devon; he devised and led the Oral Tradition course at Stanford university, and is principal teacher at the Great Mother Conference in the United States. His translations of Gaelic and Welsh folklore (with Tony Hoagland) have been published in the Mississippi Review, Poetry International, Kenyon Review, Orion, Poetry Magazine. David Abram describes his latest book, Snowy Tower, as ‘an outrageous piece of magic’, and Robert Bly describes him as ‘a true master’.